Hadrian
Director of Engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering
$300K–$415K
San Francisco Bay Area, CA · On-site · Director · Full-time · Posted Oct 20, 2026
- Visa sponsorship
- Must be a U.S. citizen or national, lawful permanent resident, protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain required U.S. Department of State authorizations to comply with ITAR.
About the job
Leads the technical strategy, delivery, and team for major customer programs, adapting Hadrian’s manufacturing platform to customer needs and feeding program learnings back into the product.
What you'll do
- Own program technical roadmaps and delivery, from initial scoping through production.
- Lead technical relationships with customer, government, and prime-partner executives; manage scope, schedule, and platform trade-offs.
- Hire and lead program teams, stay hands-on technically, and share learnings with platform teams.
What they ask for
- Demonstrated history leading engineering and product teams and scaling a product from zero to one.
- Experience owning senior customer relationships and making company commitments that must be delivered.
- Hands-on technical capability, including architecture, review, and taking ideas from design to delivery.
- AI-native approach, with concrete examples of using AI to accelerate work and reshaping team workflows around it.
Nice to have
- Founder or founding-team experience, especially with customer and business responsibilities while building.
- Background in aerospace, defense, manufacturing, hardware/software/operations, or forward-deployed or solutions leadership at a product company.
Pay
$300K – $415K USD base salary
Tools
Opus, AI
AI focus
Extends Opus, Hadrian’s AI-driven manufacturing autonomy platform, to meet program needs; expects leaders to use AI to accelerate discovery and execution and reshape team workflows around it.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative